The Professor Is In

We are delighted to bring the remarkable Allante Whitmore onto the show. The founder of Black and In Grad School (https://www.blkingradschool.com/), Allante, an Engineering PhD student at Carnegie Mellon, and proud HBCU alumna, shares with us her motivations for creating her podcast and website and annual summit helping Black grad students succeed in the academy. We talk time management, finding supporters, good boundaries, code switching, the all-important difference between rest and restorative practices, and how Allante finds grad school inspiration in rap. Kel and Karen just listen in awe.

We are delighted to bring the remarkable Allante Whitmore onto the show. The founder of Black and In Grad School (https://www.blkingradschool.com/), Allante, an Engineering PhD student at Carnegie Mellon, and proud HBCU alumna, shares with us her motivations for creating her podcast and website and annual summit helping Black grad students succeed in the academy. We talk time management, finding supporters, good boundaries, code switching, the all-important difference between rest and restorative practices, and how Allante finds grad school inspiration in rap. Kel and Karen just listen in awe.

The academy despises the IDEA of self-promotion while rewarding those who do it in properly academic ways. This is just one of the many classist elements of academia. Those who decide to leave the academy need to face and overcome the shaming around self-promotion. In this episode, Karen and Kel tell you how, with special attention to LinkedIn. We get it, it feels yucky at first. But LinkedIn is no different than your academic cover letter–it puts your skills and aptitudes out there, for potential employers. Don’t hesitate to use it, and more importantly, don’t allow yourself to be stymied and quelled by elitist academic value judgments – others’ and your own.

Moving forward in our discussion of how to build a side hustle in these scary and precarious times, Karen and Kel talk about the challenges for academics in “knowing what you know.” The challenge is, you forget and/or discount all the hundreds of skills you had to master to get to unitary academic identity categories that become so fetishized, such as: “academic”, “faculty member”, “grad student,” “scholar”, or, for example, “sociologist”, “philosopher”, or “physicist”. Making a successful postac transition means letting go of those categories, and instead recovering all the skills that went into them: Writing, reading well, managing complex ideas, collecting and retaining information, public speaking, knowing how to learn new things well and quickly, working on a shoestring budget, seeing multiple sides of an issue …. these are just a few of the skills you have that you probably don’t give yourself credit for. But they are rare and valuable. You just need to recognize and translate them.

COVID has decimated academic hiring and everybody, including the tenured, need to start prioritizing a side hustle asap. The trouble is, academics don’t go into academia to be do quick pivots and improvisational career thinking–academia is a linear path that is predicated on predictability. So it’s hard. First thing: know that you are ok, even in the face of the overwhelming message of the academy that: “you are not ok without us.” Centering yourself, remembering all the things you actually do know and can do, and extracting yourself from academic shame cycles, will allow you to take the critical first steps in imagining an income stream (and it doesn’t have to be a weighty “career” just yet!) outside the academy.

Dr. Deana Dartt, Founder and Principal of Live Oak Consulting, PhD in Anthropology and Museum Studies, and enrolled member of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation, joins us today for a conversation about the ways that racism and anti-indigeneity shape PhD training as well as the tenure track career, especially in Anthropology. Delving into shared memories of a contentious social theory graduate seminar, Deana, Karen and Kel unpack the ways that white supermacy is imposed in classroom interactions and what level of challenges are possible. Deana also shares the anti-settler-colonialist interventions she is making through her museum consulting around the kinds of structural and policy changes necessary to responsibly handle Native artifacts and resources.

Dr. Deana Dartt, Founder and Principal of Live Oak Consulting, PhD in Anthropology and Museum Studies, and enrolled member of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation, joins us today for a conversation about the ways that racism and anti-indigeneity shape PhD training as well as the tenure track career, especially in Anthropology. Delving into shared memories of a contentious social theory graduate seminar, Deana, Karen and Kel unpack the ways that white supermacy is imposed in classroom interactions and what level of challenges are possible. Deana also shares the anti-settler-colonialist interventions she is making through her museum consulting around the kinds of structural and policy changes necessary to responsibly handle Native artifacts and resources.

Building on the brand new webinar, Knowing Your Own Value in the Academy, Karen and Kel talk about how to identify and overcome the “never enough” ethos that pervades the academic enterprise. We delve into the shame and shaming that manifest this ethos, and link to the ways that the academy takes away autonomy at every turn. Our message today: learning to recognize how the academy uses shame to assert its values of hyper-productivity and competition, allows you to recover your own sense of worth, and to step back and notice when those values are in conflict with your own. In the current crisis, there is no better time to do this work.

When Karen gave the advice, “stop acting like a grad student,” she was working from a model grad student in her mind who, it turns out when she gave it a bit more thought, was a white male. In today’s episode, Karen and Kel dig into that normative model, and talk about all the ways that the advice on how a job seeker “needs to act” needs to be complicated to account for people who come from different subject positions and are viewed through different racist lenses. Advice about “thinking your department is out to get you” for example, needs to reflect that for many grad students of color, the department really is out to get you.

In this episode, Karen and Kel talk about how searches are run. While Karen wrote chapter four of the book to open up the Black Box (so to speak) of the academic job search, a closer examination reveals all the ways that the "normative" search model that she describes both reinscribes and conceals the institution's investments in whiteness at every turn. From the approval of the new line, through the ad and the search process, to the campus visit and offer, departments and search committees scaffold whiteness into every part of the process... and then wonder why the professoriate remains so white.